Apparently sometimes you have to remove symlinks to make programs load. I had a very weird bug that made a library fail to load even if the symlink was good. I wrote a bug report to bugs.debian.org and they told me to remove the symlink. That fixed it, wtf
Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I move my arm this way.
Doctor: Well, don’t move your arm that way then.
As a lay-person, reading these memes and comments, and understanding nothing, is probably the biggest factor that’s made me decide that, while I hate windows, I’ll never feel comfortable using Linux. I mean, seriously, how much of the time are you frustratingly troubleshooting stuff? I just want something like Windows that won’t shove ads and ai bullshit at me and won’t brick my laptop after updates 😭
To flip that on it’s head, if you do have computer issues, would you rather get help from someone who laughs at these silly memes or a huge ai powered bureaucracy that prioritises upselling and closing tickets?
Let’s just say that Linux invites tinkering, and there are consequences. If you install a mainstream (fedora), reliable (fedora) distro, and just do normal stuff, it’s unlikely you’ll encounter more issues than Windows. Or even a tenth of the issues.
For me, the difference between Windows and Linux is that when I encounter a weird issue on Windows, I might decide to give up, while on Linux, I can always dig deeper if I have enough time
I have a pair of old-ish but expensive Sony bluetooth over-the-ear headphones. On Windows, their microphone doesn’t work. I’ve searched the web and apparently, that’s just it, nothing I can do.
I use Linux Mint since last June and I rarely have to troubleshoot my PC and when I have to, it’s obviously my fault for messing around.
Haha me neither… i have been daily driving linux 7 years now
If it makes you feel any better, everytime I had to do this was because I was going out of my way to fix a linux game I compiled myself or some service I hacked together. I’m 99% sure you can have a hassle-free linux desktop experience if you follow the standard way your distro suggests of doing things. Have you tried testing the waters with a linux live usb stick yet?
Oh I haven’t tried anything yet. I’m too scared I’ll fuck it up 😅 Anything that has me loading boot screen and entering commands has me thinking I’ll just absent mindedly type “delete system/32” somehow
Fedora, I think?
Reminds me of when I abused LD_LIBRARY_PATH and installed a Linux from scratch distro on a headless test server that no one was using. I got it all the way to x11 forwarding a full i3 environment without super user privileges.
What in
ln - sgood name are you suggesting. Any and all uses ofln - s /usr/lib/something.so.7 /usr/lib/something.so.6is merely accidental!CKAN (mod manager for kerbal space program) created a multi month long battle for me because it started making copies of the original game for mod installs with symlinks to the original game files rather than just copying it outright, this made it impossible to boot certain mods because part of their first time set up was overriding files. Eventually I realized what the problem was and just manually copied the files in to the folder before loading up the mods for the first time.
WHICH IS INFURIATING! The whole reason I made new game installs was so that shit could be overwritten without breaking the base instal! WHY THEY HELL WOULD IT DEFAULT TO SYMLINKS FOR THAT?
Guys do not do this, it’s gonna cause a mess further down the line.
“The problem with creating these links is that they aren’t managed in any meaningful way. If that library is removed, the link becomes broken. If the library is upgraded, it may encounter an error because of the link that it doesn’t expect to be there.”
Why do we even need dynamic linking if we have deduplicating file systems?
We don’t, blame Oracle it’s their fault
Daily nixos behaviour
Ubuntu problems. Just use Arch. Then all of your software is from the same era… aka current.
Also happens on Arch.
Less often though. Way less often
I dont have this problem on Ubuntu somehow (yet?) Why does it happen to people?
Lots of software isn’t “officially” available for Debian derivatives so þere’s more need for side-loading. You may not have encountered it because you haven’t yet come across some software you’d like to use which isn’t available in an official repos.
unlikely if you install from official repos, but it’s a more common occurrence installing random debs or curl totallylegit.ru | bash…. or… installing from rpms :p (which if something only ships via rpm is likely to be enterprise and targeting RHEL rather than fedora, so super old and a non-trivial chance of random patches to libraries)
Me injecting the makemkv libraries into handbrake/ vlc
I remember when games would’t work with wine, complaining about some dll, I would get it from some random shady site and drop into the wine system dir. Some of the times, it worked, to even my own surprise
“DLL finder”, holy shit I remember tools like that… God, now that I know how shared libraries work, that’s kinda terrifying people just saw that error message and downloaded whatever the fuck they found whereever they found it…
Must be how some malware spread.
Look, man, I gotta play Sim Theme Park. If everything else blows up, that’s a problem for later.
They still exist:
The most junk hack I ever did (that somehow worked) was replacing a Tensorflow 1.x library set with the Tensorflow 2.x library set and keeping the original 1.x symlink so that the software using it would think it’s still the 1.x. .so file lol.
I presume the API had some deprecated fallback for poorly migrated software, which is why it worked without complaints.
Also bazel is by far the worst build system I have ever used.
COM solved all this stuff over 30 years ago. When you’re making breaking changes to an interface, you create a new one while still keeping the old one around (at least for a while). Both interfaces are shipped with the same DLL. Software written for the old interface continues to work, while newer software can take advantage of the extra features in the new interface.
You can do something kinda similar in Linux with sonames, like
libfoo.so.1,libfoo.so.2, etc. but there’s still a bunch of use cases where you need to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and they’re entirely separate libraries vs the COM approach where both interfaces are in a single library.Modern software keeps poorly reinventing the same concept. Software like Home Assistant has breaking changes between releases because they don’t have a consistent interface.
Its like the Gnome extension not available for your version, so you just edit the file to have your version in its list. Usually works
In my experience, this works about 25% of the time and is cause for extreme nervousness about what will happen if it tries to call a function that isn’t actually present in the version it has been fooled into accepting.
It’s never actually formatted my entire system even when it’s gotten me a little further, perhaps to a different sort of crash, but that fear is always there.
